08:15am    Here at home until lunchtime so any trades I take will be detailed below in my Trading Diary.  See below for my first position of the day already.

Market Update:

Markets in the U.S. and Europe closed mainly higher on Wednesday with upbeat earnings eports being the main drivers of the current buying spree. The S&P-500 ended the day at a 5-month high (+0.22%) after banking stocks in general had a positive session although tech stocks had a more negative day and dragged the Nasdaq down to finish at 7854.43.

The overnight Asian trading session closed mixed after a good start that was prompted by U.S. equity markets closing higher. Chinese stocks have been declining all week and last night’s performance was no different with the Shanghai Composite falling by 0.54% although the Hang Seng did recover earlier losses to close flat at28,061.10.  Most other bourses in the region finished in negative territory although the Australian ASX-200 managed a +17.60 point gain on industrial and financial sector gains.

The oil markets were fairly volatile during Wednesday’s session with conflicting news hitting the headlines.  The weekly Crude Oil Inventories showed that U.S. stocks declined but companies in the sector are reporting that they are putting more product into the market so both WTI Crude and Brent were unpredictable through most of yesterday.  WTI Crude bounced off a minor support at $66.50 but looks as though it may revisit that level again today.

Trading Diary:

08:15am   I am in a ‘short’ position on my 15-min WTI Crude Oil chart, it’s a Master-The-Trend Strategy-B pattern with a 23 pip stop loss.

11:00am   Just found out we are catching an earlier train to London so I have closed off my WTI position, it has managed +73 pips.  That’s it for today !